A lot of the characters in my novel are Tuckerizations of long-dead musicians or living friends. David Gerrold named Sherman's Planet after a friend. They gotta come from somewhere.
Worst Trek book?
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A lot of the characters in my novel are Tuckerizations of long-dead musicians or living friends. David Gerrold named Sherman's Planet after a friend. They gotta come from somewhere.
A lot of the characters in my novel are Tuckerizations of long-dead musicians or living friends. David Gerrold named Sherman's Planet after a friend. They gotta come from somewhere.
There’s a difference between an author using a friend’s name that his readers don’t know, and a Star Trek novel author using the name ‘Gene Roddenberry’ as a character.
Hey, going off the dedication plaques, there IS an Admiral Gene Roddenberry in Starfleet according to canon... 
I had an alien time-traveller in a fanfic. He was named Genrod Enbry and he invented Star Trek. This was a decade before Ben Sisko played the man who invented DS9.
And he's gotta be a Lanthanite, looking at how long he's been popping up on them!Hey, going off the dedication plaques, there IS an Admiral Gene Roddenberry in Starfleet according to canon...
The Voyager novels copped it pretty badly too. One of them even refers to the EMH as "Zimmerman" throughout.
Two even! Books two and four both have that holdover from the original plan.
Yeah, but sources don't have to be obvious. When I derive character names from real people, famous or otherwise, I try to mix and match or disguise them so they don't seem too contrived. For instance, Teresa Garcia in Department of Temporal Investigations gets her last name from Russell Garcia, the composer of George Pal's The Time Machine, but it's a common enough name that it doesn't stand out as a reference. (Her first name is a nod to two Theresas I was friends with in high school and college, respectively). And the name of Captain Reshthenar sh'Prenni in Rise of the Federation, who was the captain of the Andorian starship whose name could be translated as Enterprise, is roughly an anagram of "Shatner" and "Pine," but it's not obvious from looking at it.
What's funny to me is back then I would have hated the inconsistencies but now I think I would love the look into something like a weird alternate universe. It's like the DC early TNG comics with Picard's massive fishtank and the alien couple bickering on the bridge and the Christmas party and all kinds of nonsense. It's so bizarre and great at the same time.
And thanks for the spoiler on a SNW season that won't be out on DVD until December.
And has Spaceballs really been out that long? Yeef! I was barely out of the University when it came out! Great gobs of gooseflesh!
Taking my own novel as an example, the protagonist (a child prodigy organist) is named Jennifer Schweitzer. "Jennifer" because at least for me, it immediately conjures up my mental image of her appearance and general demeanor, and "Schweitzer" after Albert. I have characters whose surnames come directly from English Baroque composers Jeremiah Clarke and Henry Purcell. I occasionally allude to both characters and house pseudonyms created by Edward Stratemeyer (and to Stratemeyer himself). I'm not at all shy about being obvious.
And for the record: character (and place) names that allude to real people with a connection to a shared milieu don't throw me out of a story nearly as often (or as violently) as having some particularly memorable passage from a prior opus in that milieu directly (and especially needlessly) contradicted. The inconsistencies brought up in this very thread, between DD's Vulcan, JL's Vulcan, and AC's Vulcan, are bubkes (if you'll pardon my Yiddish), compared to some of the stuff I've complained about.
It's only a contradiction if two different works are trying to be in the same continuity. Historically, most Trek novels have only tried to be consistent with canon, or with their individual authors' previous works, rather than with one another. Duane and Lorrah were not attempting to tell stories in the same fictional construct as one another, only the same construct as screen canon. So there's no inconsistency, just alternative speculations. Granted, Crispin in Time for Yesterday did try to tie a lot of the previous novels together in a shared continuity they hadn't necessarily had before, and that probably led to some inconsistencies.
When I think up potential characters, I often scour the biggest baby name books available. As for surnames, some writers might find realistic or unusual names from the phone book. I could be wrong, but this trend seemed to increase with the six-plot-a-week dramas NBC began in the '80s.....the age of Furillo, Esterhaus, Westphall and Auschlander, with more popular names properly mixed in.
One reason I hesitate to use the names of people from the phone book, or from my own life, is that the selection of names probably wouldn't be diverse enough to represent humanity fairly. Fortunately, I live near a university with a very cosmopolitan student body, so at times I've been able to crib some nice non-Western names from the mailboxes in my apartment building.
This site is a great resource for diverse character names from around the world: http://www.20000-names.com/ It's not so helpful with surnames, though.
When naming planets in the human diaspora in my original sf, I hit the Wikipedia random button repeatedly until I get to the first proper noun, and then I go with whatever it is. I figure future humans aren't going to give planets space names, but name them after people and places. (For example, Roelly, Pathlawa, Skinnider, Shvarts, Lazov.) It's given me some good diversity, though I have discovered that Polish administrative districts are somewhat overrepresented there. (I did think Świętokrzyskie made a good planet name, though.) I sometimes use this technique for character names too but then I exercise more discernment if it's a character who will appear more than once.
I haven't read all Trek books but my guess is Second Self by Una MacCormack.
Why?
Because Garak is totally destroyed, ruined and killed off in that book.
It makes me so sad and angry because I really liked her books The Never Ending Sacrifice and The Crimson Shadow.
They gave me back my faith and interest in TrekLit and I was looking for more similar books when I found out about this.
Now my interest in TrekLit is shattered again. Are there no good books to read where my favorite characters aren'st destroyed?
Why?
Because Garak is totally destroyed, ruined and killed off in that book.
It makes me so sad and angry because I really liked her books The Never Ending Sacrifice and The Crimson Shadow.
They gave me back my faith and interest in TrekLit and I was looking for more similar books when I found out about this.
Now my interest in TrekLit is shattered again. Are there no good books to read where my favorite characters aren'st destroyed?
I just read this one and thought it was interesting. Not my favorite, but I wouldn't say it was the worst. The Lost Years by J.M. Dillard struck me as one of the worst.
That one is one of my favorites. I like that everyone has something to do in it.
I like when Bones is going to report to Starfleet about their situation, and Spock and Uhura basically say, "uh, I wouldn't do that if I were you." And it's funny how Spock doesn't even try to wrest command away from McCoy. He's like "my hands are tied," but he doesn't argue with Bones the way that Bones would have argued with him.
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